24 hour Kmart

There are certain inevitabilities that come with the passing of the night. As the moon floats higher and the alcohol flows in quicker than the bladder can expel it, you can count on a few things to occur. Nightclubs and bars in the CBD will continue to select, serve and expel patrons, and someone will get stabbed. Rival gangs will call for backup before a skirmish ensues, and someone will get stabbed. 24 hour McDonalds will continue to accommodate drunken folk who have nauseating stomachs that only the healthy and nutritious grease of a Big Mac can cure ... and someone will get stabbed. But the most mind-boggling certainty is that people actually go to the 24 hour Kmart at 3am.

I would have loved to have been in that meeting where they decided to turn the store into a 24 hour one.

Regional Manager: Your outlet is underperforming. We may have to close it down unless we find some way to rectify this.
Store Manager: Any ideas guys?
Employee who is having an affair with store manager: Um... how about we make it a 24 hour Kmart?
Elderly woman who has been working there all her life: That's a great idea! More time for people to come and shop.
Part-timer still finishing off his 14 year uni degree: Yeah!
11 year old supervisor: Nice one!
Male employee who always detours through the lingerie section: Yeh!!
Store manager: Yeh good idea Katie!
Only sane employee who is sitting in the corner of the room: errr...wtf?!

Honestly, I cannot see the concept of a 24 hour budget department store successfully passing through a meeting of people with IQs higher than 7. But it did, and you know what? It actually works! People actually go there at 3am in the morning.

I can see the usefulness of a 24 hour McDonalds. The aforementioned drunken munchies spreads through the night and is more deadly than the swine, cow and bird flu put together. For that same reason, 24 hour supermarkets are valid and useful. But Kmart?! The only reasons I can think of for going to a Kmart in the wee hours of the morning is that it's a stinking hot night, and you want to leech off the store's airconditioning because you live in a cheap rental house with airconditioning that doesn't work, or has killed someone through legionnaires disease. Or perhaps the barely coherent girl you picked up from that seedy pub has stripped down to her underwear, and you are halfway through dropping your pants before you realise that you are in dire need of rubber protection. Apparently, though, there are people that want to buy boots or a board game at 3am in the morning who can't wait until the next day.

So anyway, I'll be going to 24 hour Kmart this Thursday.

Many things can happen in 177 days

A minority president can finally be king of the world. A couple of Ameri, er I mean Mexicans can decide to make love with some pigs and create a new deadly global pandemic called overblown mass hysteria. Not that the swine flu was created that way. Well, at least I assume that wasn't the case. But for some reason that obviously needs addressing through professional psychological help, that was my first thought upon hearing its official name - some sick freak got a little too curious, and now the world's face mask company executives have booked a holiday to Bora Bora, the Cayman Islands, and a night in that one hotel on the corner of the hairpin at the Monaco Grand Prix. 177 days is also plenty of time to be given free fat $900 cheques in the mail, and for Wilson to finally have the balls to get House some help. It's also enough time for me to realise that Cuddy just may be the hottest 40+ year old ever. Evidently, 177 days is not long enough for news to surface of a group of rugby players masturbating in front of each other in a room of small, or intimate shall we say, dimensions with some impressionable girl in there as the ticking bomb of perilous scandal. Group sex is one thing... but honestly, what the FUCK!? Isn't wet towel slapping each other's naked butts in the showers of the lockerooms after a long game out in the cold gay enough for you guys? Oh, and 177 days is also evidently not long enough to find Osama Bin Laden .... or Wally/Waldo for that matter... especially on that damn page where everyone is in red and white. Argh!

I also forgot this thing for 177 days. Oops.